Along with a group of five batchmates from the National Institute of Design, Ashwini Deshpande set up the multi-disciplinary design consultancy Elephant Strategy + Design in 1989 with a singular mission—to create design awareness in the country. The appreciation of design, especially design for business, was totally absent in India. Elephant’s young and driven team went from client to client advocating the benefits and need for good design. Those efforts seem to have paid off. Today, Elephant is one of India’s biggest design consultancies with at least 50 projects at any given point. Yet, 25 years later, Deshpande says her enthusiasm for what she does hasn’t waned at all. She continues to carve out time on Saturdays to play the role of a design evangelist. At work, her focus is simple—creating happy, productive employees, and satisfied clients. 

I get up around 6.30am. My three cats get up before me and start meowing the moment they see I am awake. So, before doing anything else, I feed them. On a good day, I go for a 3-5km brisk walk. On lazy days which is almost every alternate day, its coffee and newspaper. This is followed by piping hot breakfast—paranthas, french toast, scrambled eggs. For some reason, we are very big on breakfast. And, it has to be a different menu every day. 

After breakfast, I usually work for around half an hour at home, if not more. We have an office in Singapore. Due to the time difference, they start their work day two and a half hour earlier. Mails from Singapore team start pouring in by 7am our time. So, before leaving home I ensure all deliverables from Pune team to be made to Singapore are planned. 

Office is about 20 minutes drive and I am usually in by 10am. Most people are already in by then. As we have flexi timings, they are free to come in any time between 8.30am to 10.30am. Actually, flexibility is an idea we’ve slowly got used to. In the initial years, I was conscious about people not being on time or wasting time talking to each other. That insecurity isn’t there anymore. Over the years, I’ve experimented with giving people their space and letting them work from home. And, I have seen people perform exceptionally well in these cases.  

The one thing we’re particular about though is Monday morning. We expect everyone in the office—all 60 of us—to be in by 10am for our Monday morning meeting where we gather at our outdoor cafe, The Palm Beach. The cafe is an open space between our two black-and-white-striped office buildings. Obviously, there is no beach but we had planted coconut trees there a few years back. It’s usually me who talks to everyone. I don’t really have to have an agenda for these meetings—the conversation can be about an interesting story, a big project, new trends or a team members’ achievement. The main idea is to start the week together on a positive note by seeing each other and giving everyone a chance to discuss their views. 

The employees of Elephant Design talk about being a part of the madness as the company turns 23.

This weekly meeting has become a ritual for all of us. It’s such a joy to see people hugging each other during these sessions just because they couldn’t meet the week before or missed each other during the weekend. It is this culture of genuine friendship that we have tried to inculcate as the company’s culture. We want to create an environment where people can form personal bonds. Friendship is at the genesis of Elephant—my husband Ashish, Partho and I have been very good friends since college. We do this by making sure we have a lot of fun events and joint celebrations in the office. For one, we celebrate all festivals with great enthusiasm. For Ganesh Chaturthi, we all made our own Ganesha idols out of clay and newspaper in office. Fortunately, India is a country teeming with festivals. We also have our annual dinner and dance event, EleFunk, and the Elephant Premier League, our cricket match series.

Team work is the very essence of design. In fact, we are named Elephant because we were so inspired by the story 'Blind Men and the Elephant'. In the story, a group of blind men touch an elephant and write about their experience. Each one feels a different part. So, one describes it as a wall, another as a rope, and for the third it is a pillar. They compare notes and learn how each version is true in itself but also incomplete. To get a sense of the complete picture, they have to put all the perspectives together. This is exactly what design is—finding a solution to a problem in a creative way. Each designer brings her own creative piece to complete the jigsaw puzzle. 

It is this philosophy that governs my professional as well as my personal life. My husband and I make our life work on collaboration. We take equal responsibility of what needs to be done at work and at home. If he is busy at home, I fill in for him at Elephant and vice versa. Even our son, who is now 20 years old, is not solely my responsibility. It was not the case even when he was much younger. Whatever we do, it is always our shared responsibility. That makes life easy and helps to maintain work life balance. 

In office, Ashish, Partho and I have very well defined roles. I take care of business development and communication design, Ashish heads product innovation team, and Partho is responsible for research, strategy and talent development in the company. In spite of that, we are closely connected. Our roles though clearly marked are not water-tight and we are forever filling in for each other. Three of us also share the same room in office to work. It is just like college days where we use to sit together to do projects. So there is no need for any formal meetings between us. Whatever we need to discuss we just have to turn around, crane our neck a bit and start talking. As creative people we understand how important discussions are. This is because creative people have a tendency to fall in love with their first idea. We think our first idea is the greatest idea and we cannot look beyond it. It’s how we all are intrinsically. And, there is nothing we can do to negate it. That is why we discuss everything among ourselves to get a more rational view of things. We encourage this attitude even within our teams. 

Team work is the very essence of design. Each designer brings her own piece to the jigsaw puzzle.

To encourage critical analysis of ideas, I have asked my team of designers to mail me the two or three ideas they worked on that day. Ideally, I would like to meet my team every day. It is from talking to them that I get all the positive energy I need. But, that does not always happen. So, this e-mail at the end of every work day helps me know what they are thinking and where they are getting their inspiration from. Reading their ideas helps to keep the designer in me alive. This practice also helps me spot which projects require my intervention, and which ones are progressing well. My first hour in office is usually spent in reading and replying to these mails. 

On most days, after I finish with my e-mails, we have team meetings at 11.30am, typically on the important projects so we can plan what needs to be done for the rest of the day. We have the next round of meetings at 3.30pm—for those not very urgent projects but to plan for the big ongoing projects. Since very few of our clients are based out of Pune, we connect to them through conference calls which we try to schedule in one of these time slots. Having time slots helps to keep the day-to-day functioning rather organised. But since conference calls are not always enough, I travel once a week, mostly to Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad or Ahmedabad where a lot of our clients are based. These are mostly day-long trips and I prefer coming home for the night despite having to stretch the day. 

“I don't feel the need to get away from work, or to unwind.”

Another reason I travel is to speak at design-related conferences. Sometimes I speak at schools or management institutes too so future managers of the country understand the importance of design and how it can benefit the business. As of now, I have lectured in more than 20 countries. Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Summit on Social Impact, Copenhagen Co-creation Summit and ICOGRADA Vancouver Design Week are some of the important platforms where I have presented. 

We took the onus to promote design on ourselves when we had incorporated our company in 1989. Then, design as a business didn’t exist in Indian corporate landscape. There were only small, boutique design firms. And, people would associate design with fashion or interior design. What we did was neither of that. So we started with educating potential clients about design. In fact, we were the first company to ask for design fees. Earlier designers would bundle up their fees with other tangible costs like production or printing cost. This was because clients would see it as a marketing expense and were hesitant to pay more. We had to work to change that mindset.Over the past 15 years, design awareness has certainly improved in the country. All our projects now come through referrals. Now, our advocacy is to drive change in the industry, not to get work for ourselves. In 2009, we became the founding members of Association of Designers of India (ADI), a body of professional designers that works for awareness, promotion and well being of the profession. Most Saturdays are meant to do Association’s work or spent in planning and delivering lectures at local management schools to spread design awareness. This is my way of giving back to the profession that I absolutely love.

A lot of people ask me about what hobbies do I have. I don’t think I have any. I enjoy my work and that is my hobby. I don’t feel the need to get away from work or to unwind. When I see products designed by us in a customer’s basket in a supermarket, or the hoardings made by us in a sports stadium, it is at moments like this that I feel an absolute high. 

Recently, we designed the 1.5 feet tall memento that Sachin Tendulkar got from The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) at the Wankhede Stadium on November 14, 2013. We designed it at a very short notice. The level of excitement that day in the office was huge; that the memento designed by us was presented to the great cricket legend. It is when projects like this come to us I feel we have made a mark. What I am keen to do is design the sports identity for the Olympics whenever the Games come to India. That is my dream project and I am eagerly waiting for it.